4-16

You Are Radioactive

A typical human body contains approximately 40 g of potassium. Most of this is
the stable, non-radioactive isotope potassium-39. Each nucleus of potassium-39
contains 19 protons and 20 neutrons, totaling 39 (that’s why it is called potassium-
39). But about 0.01% of the potassium atoms have an extra neutron in their
nucleus, these are called potassium-40. Potassium-40 is radioactive. This means
that your body contains 40/10,000 = 0.004 g = 4 mg of a radioactive cancer-
producing isotope. The number of radioactive potassium-40 atoms in your body is
6 x1019. This is not an artificial radioactivity, but it is left over from the formation
of potassium in the supernova that gave birth to our solar system (more on this
later).
Potassium-40 is often abbreviated as “K-40.” The K comes from the Latin
name “kalium” for pot ashes--the original source of potassium. Parts of the word
kalium also survive in the word “alkali.”
Approximately 1,000 atoms of K-40 (read this aloud as “potassium-40”)
explode in your body every second. Your body is radioactive. About 90% of the
explosions produce an energetic electron (beta ray); most of the rest produce an
energetic gamma ray. So there are about 1,000 self-inflicted radiations per second
from your own body. This radioactivity within your body produces a dose of
approximately 0.016 rem = 16 millirem over a 50-year period. If the linear
hypothesis is correct, we calculate the cancer induced by dividing the rem by 2500.
Your chance of having a self-induced cancer is 0.016/2500 = 6.4 x10-6, i.e. about 6
chances in a million. That’s small, although it is higher than your chances of
winning a typical grand lottery.
The results are more interesting if you think about the consequences for a
large population. There are about 300 million people in the United States. Multiply
300 million by 6 millionths of a cancer per person, and you find that 300 x 6 =
1800 people will die of cancer over the next 50 years in the United States, induced
by their own radioactivity. That averages to 36 per year in the US. If you sleep
near to somebody, then their radioactivity can affect you (see the discussion topic
at the end of the chapter).
A second source of radioactivity in our bodies comes from carbon-14, also
called “radiocarbon,” and abbreviated C-14. The C-14 nucleus is similar to that of
the ordinary C-12 nucleus, except that it has two extra neutrons (increasing the
atomic weight from 12 to 14). But, it turns out, those extra neutrons make carbon-
14 radioactive. In carbon-14, one of the neutrons will explode, emitting an electron
and a particle called a neutrino (which we’ll describe in just a moment). When the
electron and neutrino are emitted, the neutron turns into a proton, so the remaining
nucleus is nitrogen. On average, half of the carbon-14 atoms in your body will
explode in 5730 years. That period of 5730 years is called the “half-life” of C-14.
Every gram of carbon in your body has 12 atoms of carbon-14 exploding
every minute. That is equivalent to 1 explosion every 5 seconds, on average. In an
average body, there are about 3,000 such radioactive explosions every second.16
This is in addition to the 1,000 K-40 decays mentioned earlier.
Now here is the really fascinating thing about C-14: we can use it to measure
how long things have been dead. To see how this works, we have to understand a
very strange phenomenon in radioactive decay that is called the “half-life rule.”

16
This assumes you weight 150 lbs and are 23% carbon (typical for humans).